With a wave of the hand

U.S. immigration policies increasingly harsh, leader in migration research says.

U.S. immigration policies increasingly harsh, leader in migration research says.

April 11, 2006

The driver pulled up to the curb and with a wave of the hand, told them all to climb in. It was the summer of 1969 in the lower Rio Grande Valley. About 30 of the migrants fit in the truck. One of the men, all of whom had crossed the United States-Mexico border illegally, was Jorge Bustamante, now a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He was then a doctoral student at the same university, trying to understand the process of recruitment of migrant workers in the States. (He had a legal student visa.) The driver took them to a ranch near Mission, Texas. With another wave of the hand, he told them all to get out. Everyone formed a line, and Bustamante, who was doing this for the first time, played along. The rancher was looking for labor, but he couldn't use all of them. "Raise your hand if you're willing to work for $1 an hour," he told them. Almost everyone raised their hands, including Bustamante, for whom this was an experiment of sorts. To those who didn't raise their hands the rancher told them to leave. "Raise your hand if you can work for 75 cents an hour," the rancher told them. Only half of them raised their hands this time, and the rancher asked those who didn't to leave. Still too many of you, the rancher told them. "Raise your hand if you can work for 50 cents," he told them, and only about seven of them did, including Bustamante. The rest left cussing, calling those who had stayed a disgrace, men without dignity. Then the men held their hands supine above their waists, and Bustamante did the same. The rancher examined each of their palms, as though he were a fortune teller. He was looking for blisters and other signs of hard work. Bustamante's academic hands were quickly rejected, and he left the other workers behind. But the workers never left him. They have shaped his work ever since. "That really opened my conscience," Bustamante said, sitting behind his desk at the Kellogg Institute last week, on a day when the U.S. Senate had reached a stall in a debate over immigration reform. "It was like a counter-haggle," Bustamante said, "Those who got the offer were the worst off. An explanation to that is what led me Pablo Ros Voces Latinas Pablo Ros writes a weekly feature for The Tribune. to study migration." There was and is a demand for foreign workers in the States, Bustamante said, and how that market attracts them and how they fare in it is what has guided his research throughout the years. Bustamante has been teaching at the University of Notre Dame for 20 years. He is a fellow at the university's Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, which promotes comparative international research. But he was also the president of and continues to be a professor at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (The Northern Border College), which he founded in 1982 in Tijuana, a border city, to promote the scientific study of the U.S.-Mexico border. In August, Bustamante also became the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of migrants for the agency's human rights commission. And this year, the Mexican Congress nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. Bustamante, who was born in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua and has studied immigration patterns along the U.S.-Mexico border for more than 30 years, said he is pessimistic about the changes he has seen over the years in U.S. immigration policy, which has become "increasingly restrictive, more vulnerable to the violation of human rights." Bustamante also said U.S. immigration laws, often motivated by a growing xenophobia, have made it easier for employers to exploit workers. Such laws fail to recognize that immigration is caused by factors on both sides of the border: the supply of work is a response to the demand for it. And not only has the demand for workers increased, he said, it has also become more diversified. While decades ago most demand for labor was in agriculture, Bustamante said, now foreign workers are needed in hotels, restaurants and other industries. But even if foreign labor is indispensable to the U.S. economy, Bustamante said, many people are unwilling to recognize it as such, partly because they see immigrants as inferior to them. Bustamante said that a solution to the problem of immigration from Mexico, where six of the 11 undocumented immigrants in the States are from, also requires that both governments work together. To the recognition that the problem of immigration is bilateral, Bustamante said, must be added funds to develop those areas in Mexico where people are being forced to leave their families to work in the States. But the way things have been going, he said, it looks tough.